Fairfax County’s public schools are failing their most vulnerable students

Data released this month indicate high levels of failure on Virginia’s Standard of Learning exams among Fairfax County’s multilanguage students, formerly labeled English language learners.

2023-2024 Multilanguage Learner SOL Proficiency

Fairfax County’s multilanguage students are performing poorly, but it is even worse than it seems when comparing scores across Virginia. They have shocking rates of failure in writing and history that are far worse than the other multilanguage learners in other Virginia public school districts.

After January 2021, when the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors passed its sanctuary policy ,  the number of students who are multilanguage learners increased significantly. By 2023, 26.5% of the district’s students were labeled multilanguage learners. This has created a substantial resource and learning gap burden for our district.

Our school board members and the district’s superintendent, Michelle Reid, must address this problem and provide solutions. They are intending to redistrict our children as stipulated in Policy 8130, shuffling high-performing students to low-performing schools and spreading multilanguage learners across the district.

Fairfax County’s parents and taxpayers deserve more than an unjust boundary overhaul that devalues our homes and affects the quality of our children’s education. We also deserve answers about poor academic performance among our most vulnerable populations as our property taxes increase considerably every year to pay for public education.

In an interview this week, the chairman of Fairfax County’s school board, Karl Frisch , dodged a question about this and misled the public.

When a reporter asked Frisch what his plans were to help vulnerable students who are failing state exams in math, science, reading, writing, and history, he claimed that, through its strategic plan, the district’s leadership is “making sure students are reading grade level by third grade and encouraging students to take more advanced math in middle school, ideally finishing algebra before they go into high school.”

While those are indeed noble goals, they do not address the larger academic and accreditation problems facing the school district. Multilanguage learners account for a significant portion of Fairfax County’s student population and their numbers are growing. Compounding the difficulties is that their age of enrollment is often in high school, where early learning interventions are not an option.

While district leadership fails to address this problem with the public and offer solutions, they are penalizing school principals when their individual schools perform poorly in the state’s standards of accreditation.

But this is a systemic issue and largely beyond the control of individual school principals. Perhaps this is contributing to the mass exodus of principals in Fairfax County’s public schools. From 2022 to 2024, 54 principals retired or resigned from Fairfax County’s public schools — a substantially larger number than comparably sized, nearby districts, including Loudoun County in Virginia and Prince George’s County in Maryland.

When prompted by a reporter last year to detail why they chose to leave their positions, three Fairfax County principals interviewed under conditions of anonymity all cited Reid’s disconnect at the district level with what is happening at the school level.

It would seem that the inundation of newly arrived, multilanguage learner students concentrated in certain schools, particularly in the six failing high schools in Fairfax County, would be top among principals’ issues of concern.

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While the district’s superintendent holds principals accountable for the things that are out of their control, who is holding Queen Reid accountable for the poor academic performance of multilanguage learners districtwide?

Eight of the 12 school board members are new this year. It is time for them to review the district’s expectations of a superintendent, which undoubtedly should include that our vulnerable students pass state exams and our schools pass accreditation standards, and then hold her accountable for those expectations.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.